Lowered Expectations

Billmon.

If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn't have believed you -- just as I wouldn't have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year while various federal, state and local bureaucrats and hack politicians tried to make up their minds what to do.

I would have said that while those kind of things can and do happen in Third World kleptocracies or decaying Stalinist police states, they're simply not possible in the richest and most powerful nation in history. Even if the voters could somehow be bamboozled into accepting such incompetence, the wealthy elites and corporate technocrats who own and operate the world's only remaining superpower would never stand for it.

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at a amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in an vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

My emphasis.

Montana Senate Race

I've got some young friends living & working in Montana. They haven't been there long, but they have Conrad Burns nailed - an idiot, is how one friend described him. This news article talks about a debate between Burns & Jon Tester, the Democratic nominee. Burns is a piece of work. He's using the old Nixonian ploy of proclaiming himself "not a crook." It won't work. People know what an Abramoffed piece of steer dung he is. Jon Tester is exactly what the country needs, someone who actually works for a living.

Members of the audience took offense and shouted “psycho” and booed as Burns claimed that Democratic Senate candidate Jon Tester has an illegal slush fund, has taken “unreported” trips to Taiwan, and made illegal phone calls to raise campaign funds.

The Twins

I was able to feed Lucy this a.m. Everything went well except I was really sweating. Dripping off my nose, even. The older I get he less I can take hear, although it's nice outside today, 50ish. Here are some more pics of The Twins. The Kid broke a vow to me, she vowed never to dress the twins alike, well, you can see how far that went - less that two weeks. Marigny has graduated to a crib, she's able to regulate her temperature well. Lucy is still in an isolette. These pics are way more interesting than listening to Darth Cheney try to scare us all into becoming Nazis. Enjoy these charming & according to Mrs. coldH2O, quite intelligent girls.

The Twins

Lucy

Marigny

This pics were taken at 3 a.m. this morning.

September 11

I was watching MSNBC the morning that two planes flew into the World Trade Center's two buildings. On live teevee, I saw the second plane crash into the building. This became the third live teevee tragedy I witnessed. The first was in 1963 with Jack Ruby murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. I was sick that Oswald would not face justice. I was a freshman in high school when that happened. I won't go into the whole JFK beacon of true light generation, that soon faded with Viet Nam, but many of us felt great possibility with America back then, things have clearly changed. The second tragedy involved boxing. I watched as Boom Boom Mancini murdered Duk Koo Kim on a November day. I use the word murder purposely & it reflects on Mancini as it was his fists that caused the death of another person. We have so many words that deflect true meaning - execution, harvest, etc., that ought to offend everyone, but we are generally gentle creatures who like our tea weak, & in the process avoid the truth. OK, back to 9/11. I hate the term - 9/11 - since the ReThugs keep using as a whip to scare people. That's all these people have in their bag - fear. Scare the devil out of America & we'll get reelected, who cares about the proper way to govern a country? So, while reading James Wolcott this a.m., I came across this analysis of the on going 9/11 grief fest, blame fest. Simon Jenkins writes for the GuardianUlimited Network. This makes a person think & nod their head in agreement, sorrow, horror, & a fierce determination to change things.

Even if The Path to 9/11 were politically pure, its raison d'etre would be suspect. How many times and how many ways must the adrenaline be pumped, the tragedy replayed, and the suffering exploited? The fall of the towers has become a ritual fetish, an annual haunting, that doesn't exorcise fear, but replenishes it.

"What has changed, grotesquely, is the aftershock," Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian, delivering a splash of cold reality. "Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible. This response has become 24-hour, seven-day-a-week amplification by the new politico-media complex, especially shrill where the dead are white people. It is this that puts global terror into the bang. While we take ever more extravagant steps to ward off the bangs, we do the opposite with the terrorist aftershock. We turn up its volume. We seem to wallow in fear.

"Were I to take my life in my hands this weekend and visit Osama bin Laden's hideout in Wherever-istan, the interview would go something like this. I would ask how things have been for him since 9/11. His reply would be that he had worried at first that America would capitalise on the global revulsion, even among Muslims, and isolate him as a lone fanatic...

"In the event Bin Laden need not have worried. He would agree, as did the CIA's al-Qaida analyst in Peter Taylor's recent documentary, that the Americans have done his job for him. They panicked. They drove the Taliban back into the mountains, restoring the latter's credibility in the Arab street and turning al-Qaida into heroes. They persecuted Muslims across America. They occupied Iraq and declared Iran a sworn enemy. They backed an Israeli war against Lebanon's Shias. Soon every tinpot Muslim malcontent was citing al-Qaida as his inspiration. Bin Laden's tiny organisation, which might have been starved of funds and friends in 2001, had become a worldwide jihadist phenomenon.

"I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his sleeve for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The western media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the screaming, turning the base metal of violence into the gold of terror. They would replay the tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus remind the world of his awesome power. Americans are more afraid of jihadists this year than last. In a Transatlantic Trends survey, the number of them describing international terrorism as an 'extremely important threat' went up from 72% to 79%...

"Bin Laden might boast that he had achieved terrorism's equivalent of an atomic chain reaction: a self-regenerating cycle of outrage and foreign-policy overkill, aided by anniversary journalism and fuelled by the grim scenarios of security lobbyists. He now had only to drop an occasional CD into the offices of al-Jazeera, and Washington and London quaked with fear. The authorities could be reduced to million-dollar hysterics by a phial of nail varnish, a copy of the Qur'an, or a dark-skinned person displaying a watch and a mobile phone."

I'll be in Cape May this 9/11, as I was on the 9/11 of 2001, and the ones before and since. I don't intend to watch any of the memorial coverage, listen to the radio, or pore over the newspaper supplements. It'll be a day for going to the beach and listening to the underlying bass of the sloshing tide, for birding in the meadow or at the hawk watch, a day for tuning out the too-talkative world. The vapor trails of jets flying overhead will be all the reminder one needs of that September morning.

Soy Sauce Incident

What soy sauce incident?

Sunday Morning

Atrios wonders why we invaded Iraq, so do I, I also wonder why we invaded Afganistan, particularly if we didn't plan to fix it after we won it. Things are not better in the world, no matter what Bu$hCo says. The facts just do not support the b.s. foaming from his mouth. I live in the woods, far from the urban life, the large targets, the close proximity to packed subways. & yet, it's clear that I will not, in the rest of my sorry lifetime, be able to go to places that I've thought about since I was a kid - the general Middle East, for one area. Now, I'm not wealthy, so it could be argued that I wouldn't have gone anyway, but for me, the possibility was what made some days bearable, some daydreams interesting. Being reality based, however, even with that brief incident a while back, means that facts have meaning, meaning that can't be twisted for politcal gain. Yet, we have Joanne Weintraub, entertainment writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel give a glowing review of ABC's atrocity of a film, The Path To 9/11. She mentions, barely, the fact that the film has serious factual problems. But that's OK she says, just enjoy it as a drama, a piece of fluff to help with boredom, with the Packer's season. But she fits right in with Bu$hCo's view of the world. The Los Angeles Times does its job a bit differently. In this story Doyle McManus discusses what the supporters of war won't - that it's way more complicated than starting a vanity war in Iraq.

• Al Qaeda, the initial focus of the "global war on terror," has been disrupted and dispersed. But it has been succeeded by a looser network of affiliates and homegrown terrorists — like those who carried out bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 — who could grow to be just as dangerous.

• The war in Iraq has become a training ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other countries, and some have returned home with expertise in urban warfare and explosives. Some experts fear the Persian Gulf's oil terminals could be among their next targets.

• Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon have damaged the image of the U.S. in much of the Muslim world and made it easier for terrorist organizations to win recruits. The wars and controversies over U.S. treatment of detainees also have made it more difficult for allied governments to cooperate with American counterterrorism programs, diplomats say.

• When Foreign Policy magazine surveyed more than 100 experts earlier this year, 84% said they did not believe the United States was winning the war on terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times poll, fewer than one-fourth of Americans said they believed the nation was "winning"; more than half said it was too soon to tell.

Rumsfeld The Appeaser

Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussien. & Rumsfeld has the gall to accuse those of us who oppose(d) Bu$hCo's vanity war of being appeasers? What a fucking hypocrite.

NOLA

Via the Kid, the Son-in-Law, & The Twins:

For those of you who have not seen Robert Mugge’s film “New Orleans Music in Exile,” it is still being shown in rotation on the Starz InBlack cable network. The Iguanas are featured along with Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Eddie Bo, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, The ReBirth Brass Band, Cowboy Mouth and others. Go to ...the official web site, [to see] a trailer of the film. For a synopsis and link to upcoming air dates go here.

If you watched Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” on HBO recently, you know that the city of New Orleans faces a struggle to rebuild like no other U.S. city has had to endure in the last century. If you would like to do something to directly assist musicians affected by Hurricane Katrina, we recommend you check out the Tipitina’s Foundation.

This comes from The Iguanas, here's their website.

No Dam = Good Dam

This is great news on a crisp (read 34 degrees F.) Saturday morning in early September.

The historic Buck and Jones irrigation dam on the Little Applegate River flows into history today.

The end of the old structure, part of the Buck and Jones Ditch Association irrigation system whose water rights tap into the 1880s, begins when an excavator armed with a special attachment from M&M Services of Central Point starts breaking apart the concrete base around 10 a.m. today.

Removing the dam to improve fish passage and conserve water has been a primary goal of the Applegate River Watershed Council, explained council member George Rice.

"Removing this dam has opened up about 35 miles of habitat to steelhead salmon on the Little Applegate River and its tributaries," he said.

Amur Leopard Cat

Amur Leopard Cat
Prionailurus (bengalensis) euptilura

Another Day Of Infamy

September 08

1974 President Ford pardons former President Nixon

I'd forgotten. I do remember that I was in a home on 2nd St. in a town in far northern Wisco helping to figure out who got what from a pickup truckload of food that a couple of us had brought up from the Cities. That was back before the Food Coop storefront. We were listening to the radio & the announcement came on the air. Looking back, it was another downward step in the decline of democracy in America. Headline via The Progressive.

Images, Images

Here's a good one.

I'm assuming y'all are up-to-date on the bullshit lies coming out of ABC's "movie" on 9/11. If not, go here & it'll get you up to speed.

This one's from Billmon & it's my favorite. If ABC doesn't cancel this Big Lie, The Twins won't be getting any of the Disney stuff that their mother got. In fact, I'm never going to Disneyland again, even if I do win the MVP of this year's Super Bowl.

Why Is This News?

Anyone with a brain with any electricity flowing in it knew this was true.

There is no evidence of formal links between Iraqi ex-leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq prior to the 2003 war, a US Senate report says.

The finding is contained in a 2005 CIA report released by the Senate's Intelligence Committee on Friday.

US President George W Bush has said that the presence of late al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of a link.

Opposition Democrats say the report has harmed Mr Bush's case for going to war.

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that the US president has again and again tried to connect the war in Iraq, which most Americans think was a mistake, with the so-called war on terror, which has the support of the nation.

The Twins

& Dad.